What happened? What took two years?

First of all I made a personal website – oyvindsolstad.com – and moved my personal stuff over there.

Second Twitter came and I put most of my link tips and discussion with people on Twitter. My English nick is @oyvind, and I also use a Norwegian one – @osol. Feel free to use whichever you prefer, and I’ll answer in the proper language on both.

And last, but most importantly: I had a major change in my personal life, and my job changed a lot too. So here I am – it’s 2009 – and I feel it’s time to pick up on brilliantdays.com again. My life is better than ever, and this wonderful weekend I’ve been tossing out old clothes, cleaning the closet, getting my todo-list and projects back in shape, training, sleeping and fixing this site with latest versions of all plugins, a new theme (for now – I’ll keep looking for an even better) and fixing the feed.

Mac and iPhone

From now on, this will be my Mac and iPhone site. I have tons of ideas, tips, links and other stuff related to Macs and iPhones. I’ll post them here on a highly no-regular basis. =)

I have used Macs since the Macintosh SE, and I’m currently on my 13th Mac, my 6th and 7th iPod and second iPhone. I have administered Macs for office use, for sound processing and use in radio, and a large SAN for Final Cut Pro. I have attended WWDC twice, in 2007 and 2009 but not published any apps yet.

I’ll post tips on how to use your Mac in brilliant ways, how to use your iPhone, and I’ll post all kinds of ideas for software. I usually tip software developers all the time and instead of just e-mailing them suggestions, I’ll post them here and let you guys have a look at the same time. That way, the ideas get better, the competitors see the ideas so their apps get better – and we all win. How does that sound? That is – if my ideas are any good!! We’ll se…

In other words: It will not take two years for the next post to appear here!

See my aboutpage for links and contact data.

Then I realized that I had recently installed the WP-mobile plugin written by Alex King (although I hadn’t yet had the chance to test it out on my Treo using Blazer.) So, I whipped out my phone, hit scottburkett.com with my phone’s browser, and voila, the theme was switched to the default theme. It turns out that I had not properly followed the instructions provided by Alex in the plugin archive.

The WordPress Mobile Edition plugin detects if your site is viewed on a mobile device, and delivers a lighter and friendlier site for small screens. But I made the same mistake as Scott Burkett; not reading the install text:

== Installation ==

1. Drop the wp-mobile.php file in your wp-content/plugins directory
1. Drop the wp-mobile directory in your wp-content/themes directory
2. Click the ‘Activate’ link for WordPress Mobile Edition on your Plugins page (in the WordPress admin interface)

Ah. So dropping the whole WP-mobile folder into the plug-ins folder was not the right way to do it. We’ll see if brilliantdays.com stays “nice” the next 24 hours. The last four days it has changed back to the default theme a dozen times.

And if you have a mobile phone or other handhelp device with a browser, go to brilliantdays.com and see if the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin does it’s job ok.

Twice the last 24 hours it has changed back to the default theme. Very strange. So if brilliantdays.com looks like it just has been set up, now you know why.

(googling “switching back to default theme by itself”…)

Update: This is getting ridiculous. I thought it would help to delete the standard theme. But then WordPress just changes the theme to the empty theme, making the whole site go totally blank for the whole night. Aaaargh. If you have any idea what this is caused by, please leave a comment here.

Update: Problem solved (I hope).

So here are the ones that have sent the most traffic to brilliantdays.com since September 2005 (search engines, social bookmarking, corporate sites, forums and directories NOT included).

Eirikso.com
Aharef
Presentation Zen
StyleMac
Eric Mack On-Line

Adam Rice
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection
sugarfused.net
Kevin Lim
Paul Stamatiou

Thanks people!

I also have picked out a two articles I recommend:

What is good PowerPoint design? on Presentation Zen
How to make illustrations even if you can’t draw on Eirikso.com

Who are your major sources for traffic?

My site gets 60% of the traffic from referrers, 20% from searches and 20% direct. What’s your numbers?

The logo is supposed to combine two things:

A stylized sun – something you need on a brilliant day (and here’s why the site is called brilliantdays.com), and a stylized Ø – the first letter in my name. It’s a special character only used in Norway and Denmark. So I ususally just write my name with an O instead: Oyvind.

Why a green sun? I just like the colors.

What do you think?

I have lots of tweaking and messing about with PHP, CSS and HTML before I’m happy. But I think it’s a good start. It felt good to get rid of the heavy green line at the top. I may reintroduce some more color up there, but for now I’ll stay with lots of white. It’s summer!

Put this link into iTunes or your podcasting app of choice. Or use the button in the left sidebar.

I set it up today, and I can’t figure out why not all the latest posts are there. I’ll check back in a few days and see if it is fixed.

What do you think? The computer generated voice was much better than I expected, and it is a great feature for people who can’t read webpages for different reasons.

If someone at Technorati happen to read this: Can you please contact me?

Update
After 77 days – yes, 77 days – Technorati finally managed to fix the indexing of my site. I’m happy that it now works, but 77 days??? The Technorati idea and system is a great idea, but you can’t have a system where people have to wait for 2 1/2 months, enter six support requests AND post on their sites before getting any attention from a human.

For some reason, one of the files controlling the site got messed up, and my site went offline for several hours. It’s back up now, and everything should be working.

The redirects are not working as they should yet. They will be fixed!

And the layout look crap. It will also be fixed!

Stay tuned!

Update: Layout fixed. Working on redirects.

Update: Redirects fixed. If you find any “old” links that don’t work anymore, feel free to contact me!

Or use this contact form:

Please give a reason why you’re sending me a link, not just the link. If you can’t give me a reason, I will simply ignore it.

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